Contextual Advertising and Audience Targeting Provider Proximic Launches Proximic Brand Protection, Enabling Online Advertisers and Publishers to Flag Objectionable Content and Target Ads from Single Platform

Palo Alto, CA - March 25, 2010 (MARKET WIRE via COMTEX) — Proximic (www.proximic.com), a leading provider of Contextual Matching Services for online advertising networks, agencies, publisher networks and demand-side platforms (DSPs), today announced the launch of Proximic Brand Protection, a brand-safety product that provides third-party verification of ad placements on Web pages, online publications, and other online content areas, increasing the potential value and commercial viability of the content while protecting brand advertisers from any non-premium or objectionable traffic. In addition to helping partners avoid objectionable or non-premium advertising environments, Proximic’s page contextualization and audience targeting services then enable advertisers to easily direct their ads to safe and more relevant and monetizable areas online, all at the speed of ad delivery, as opposed to ‘after the fact’ analysis.

Leveraging language-independent technologies, Proximic’s contextualization and targeting services were initially deployed with several of China’s most prominent Internet entities, including Taobao, China’s largest Internet retail platform, which also includes an online advertising exchange and affiliate network for hundreds of thousands of publishers, as well as Allyes, one of the leading Internet advertising properties in China.

Using its proprietary Pattern Proximity profiling and filtering technology and following established industry guidelines from the Interactive Advertising Bureau, Proximic Brand Protection was developed to proactively prevent online brand damage and increase media efficiency, all while protecting advertising brands online, with the goal of improving the success and ROI of campaigns. It can also certify and endorse network inventory, then monitor and classify the inventory for increased inventory performance.

Proximic Brand Protection’s matching and filtering technology provides:

• Distinct content scores: Provides industry-standard content quality scores across different levels (page level up to publisher/site) and over time, specifically targeting and flagging non-standard content types such as sexual content, offensive content and user-generated content found in social media environments; monitors compliance of a partner publishers’ inventory and assesses the overall risk on brand exposure;
• Protection beyond English: Pattern Proximity empowers brand protection in Spanish, French, German and Chinese, with more languages to follow. Proximic’s core technologies are language-independent, making it possible for Proximic partners to leverage the power of Brand Protection in markets beyond the US;
• Preventive Ad-call Implementation, rather than after-the-fact analysis: Prevents unsafe impressions monitoring within the ad call rather than relying on post-campaign analysis secures “real-time readiness” through adaptive processing frequency of pages depending on various risk levels;
• Transparent and Live API Reporting: Proximic provides live reporting access and alerts servers in real-time with transparent scores when Proximic Brand Protection identifies scoring flags;
• Lower total-cost-of-ownership: Proximic customers can now use one technology platform in conjunction with both audience targeting and page contextualization;
• Easy integration, with versatile levels of deployment: Proximic designed Brand Protection to meet various levels of client needs and technical capabilities. Clients can use different methods to access the Proximic API for scoring data in all common reporting standards.

“In launching Proximic Brand Protection, we have made it easy to avoid brand damage as immediately and transparently as possible. We’ve merged this with our targeting services for the simple reason to help our partners remove the risk from featuring ads in non-premium inventory and increase advertising reach and boosting efficiency at the same time. With that, our customers can reach relevant brand audiences at larger scale and with more confidence,” said Philipp Pieper, Proximic CEO. “Proximic Brand Protection runs together with other Proximic services and is operated on the same infrastructure, which significantly increases ad efficiency, unlocks targeting potential and reduces the total cost of ownership for our partners.”

Brand Protection is part of Proximic’s Suite of Contextual Matching Services. By merging services for brand protection and ad targeting, Proximic safeguards and verifies ad placement, while boosting advertising reach and efficiency. Together, this helps Proximic partners reach relevant audiences at larger scale with higher confidence.

About Proximic

Proximic is a leading provider of Contextual Matching Services for online advertising and publisher networks. Combining non-linguistic contextual profiling technologies, Proximic enables advertising networks, agencies, DSPs, and publisher networks to identify better ad matches across highly granular topical interests. Proximic is a privately funded company based in Palo Alto, California with offices in Beijing, China. The company is backed by investors such as Wellington Partners, which ranks among the most successful pan-European venture capital firms, and the Holtzbrinck Group, the publishing group of numerous publications including the Scientific American. To learn more, visit www.proximic.com.

For further information, please contact:
Mark S. Peterson
Pointer PR LLC
mark@pointerpr.com
206-390-0204

We all are starting into the holiday, so you may prefer a beach or something else instead of sitting in front of your computer. So as of today we give you an additional way to access and download all the stats you need for the balance sheet of this first semester with our publisher program: let others do the work.
We will send your report directly to the recipient(s) you chose, once it is available depending on its frequency - daily, weekly or monthly.

To setup e-mail delivery for your reports, simply go to your Reports>Performance Reports page, and click on “Save Report Template”. This will save your report together with the parameters (date range, type of report, data granularity) as a report template and it will automatically be delivered to your defaulting account email address as a zip file attachment upon its corresponding frequency. The frequency depends on the date range parameter, and report templates can only be saved for date ranges of ‘yesterday’, ‘last week’ or ‘last month’, corresponding to a daily, weekly or monthly delivery.

All your report templates will then be listed in the Reports>Report Manager page, where you can then edit the name, the email recipients, the format of the report, or switch the status to ‘pause’ at any time. Also, the report templates you’ve saved can then be accessed directly via a drop-down menu on the Performance Report page.

You will now be able to be away from your account, while keeping an eye on the ad performance in your inbox.

Sign in to your Publisher Program now and setup your report templates for this summer!

Proximic has released our Ad Unit Management feature: now all the settings from your ad units are stored on our servers. That means, each time you want to change the colors, the font, the ad group, or even the new zero risk option for your ad units, you can make the changes directly in your publisher account rather than generating and pasting new code.

Below are the answers to some questions you may have about the ad management feature:

• What’s different from how I used to create ad units?

Read more…

Today Proximic launches our Zero Risk option for publishers.

Say you’re an aficionado of Google Adsense but still open to the latest cutting-edge technologies in advertising and publishing networks. Yet trying out a new service usually implies risking not to earn as much as you are used to with your current service.

Proximic provides a solution for you: with the Zero Risk option, you can now set a minimum price for an ad spot on your site. Then give us an advertising tag as the backup of another ad network you signed up with and we will use that one instead if we prognose that we cannot meet the minimum price. That allows you to utilize your ad space more efficiently and get paid if we don’t sell.

Therefore, it’s okay to try us out – no risk involved. Read more…

The Proximic Publisher API v1 now offers a new Web Service: the User Service: you can get and update the information related to your Publisher Program account.

• Manage your Account Information

You can now get and update your sign in information, contact information and your payment information via the user service of the Publisher API.

• Manage your Competitive Ad Filter Settings

With this new user service, you can also add, edit and get the block keywords and block URLs that were available on the page Manage Ads > Competitive Ad Filter of your Publisher Program. Read more…

The Proximic Publisher API v1 now offers a new Web Service: the Ad Group Service.

Just like you were able to manage ad groups through the Proximic Publisher Program, you can also create, edit, delete and retrieve your list of ad groups through the Ad Group Service of the Publisher API.

By assigning ad groups to your ad units, you can track a variety of performance metrics across your websites. Using ad groups will help you understand how your site traffic flows and what’s really generating revenue for you. For instance, ad groups can be used for the following criteria: Read more…

The Proximic Publisher Program features a new geotargeting tool.
Now you can preview how your users from around the world see the Proximic ads on your website.

Say you are a Publisher located in India with your main audience from England. Since we currently deliver ads for users located in a limited amount of countries* which India is not part of, this tool would allow you to check the quality of the ads returned to your English users. Read more…

Your Proximic Publisher Program now features 7 new performance reports.

The ad unit performances (ad impressions, ad clicks, click-through-rate, Average CPC, eCPM and earnings) can now be aggregated with a combination of day, group, referrer and format criteria.

Example: you can get a report by “day & group” and see which one of your group is performing the best on a day-to-day basis.

Or you can try a report by “referrer and format” to check for each of your web pages, which ad unit format is getting the best click-through rate.

As always, each report can be downloaded in .CSV, .XLS or .XML format. These new reports are also available via the Proximic Publisher API, see more details here.

Sign in to your Publisher Program now (go to Reports > Performance reports) and play with your own combination of reports!

What’s an ad group?

Ad Groups enable you to verticalize your ad units into different groups based on your specified criteria and view detailed reporting about the performance of these groups.
Say you’re a sport publisher and have several topic pages about “soccer” and “tennis”. By creating the ad groups “soccer” and “tennis”, and then assigning your ad units to one of these ad groups, you can compare the performances of your soccer pages to your tennis pages. While ad groups can be used to track performance and revenue, they won’t have any effect on your earnings or ad targeting.

With up to 100 ad groups, you can manage your groups to gain the insight you need to optimize your site’s performance. It’s easy to add, delete, or rename your ad groups, and customized reports are simple to generate.

Read more…